Do we need Holocaust Remembrance Day?
Since some may be incredulous that I even asked that question, let me explain why I am doing so.
A scandal has erupted in Ireland regarding whether or not Israel can be mentioned at the forthcoming official Holocaust commemoration (International Holocaust Remembrance Day is on Jan. 27).
It was Yanky Fachler, the avuncular Irish-Jewish broadcaster who has been the event’s master of ceremonies for several years now, who alerted the outside world to this development when he released a letter from Peter Cassells, the chair of Holocaust Educational Trust Ireland, informing Fachler that he could not say the words “Israel” or “Jewish state” in any of his remarks.
After a subsequent tussle with HETI, Fachler was informed that his services as host would no longer be needed.
For what it’s worth, HETI has since clarified that there “is no ban on mentioning Israel at the Holocaust Memorial Day commemoration in Ireland. Israel will be referred to, and the Israeli ambassador has attended and participated in the ceremony since its inception in 2003 and will do so again in January 2015.”
But there was no apology for the initial decision and, more important, no explanation as to how it was reached. When I recently spoke to Fachler, he told me that while it was unlikely HETI would reinstate him as emcee, he wouldn’t want the role anyway, given the lack of answers from the organization as to why he was told not to mention Israel.
I don’t know whether HETI will ever provide an unvarnished account as to how it arrived at, and then apparently revised, this ban. I’ve tried to get answers from Cassells, but his office has remained silent.
What I do know is that the controversy in Ireland neatly captures the tension between those who want to emphasize the universal lessons of the Holocaust and those who place the accent on what the extermination of 6 million of our people means for future generations of Jews.
That tension shouldn’t really be there. There is no reason why we cannot mourn Jews who died solely because they were Jews and salute those who resisted the Nazi menace even as they suffered from hunger and cold, while at the same time pointing to the Jewish experience during World War II as a moral lesson against future genocides and those that have already occurred in Rwanda, Bosnia, the Kurdish region of Iraq and other locations.
It seems that HETI, as Fachler pointed out to me, cares more about dead Jews than living ones. That’s certainly one potential explanation as to why HETI believes it’s manifestly all right to grieve for those who died but denies the right of their descendants to express pride in the central achievement of post-Holocaust Jewry: the creation of the State of Israel.
Increasingly, Holocaust education is becoming general tolerance education. From warning against the evils of genocide in general — a legitimate and important thing to do — we now wield the Holocaust as a tool to combat ills from the bullying of overweight kids to anti-immigrant rhetoric. And that means we lose our perspective. You don’t need to invoke the Holocaust to explain why harassing someone over his appearance or origin is wrong.
Equally, this same emphasis on one human family is diluting the particular lessons of the Holocaust for Jews, as well as providing an opportunity for anti-Zionists — of whom there are many in Ireland, as elsewhere in Europe — to scorn and demean the idea that Jewish sovereignty is the best answer to the persecution of our people.
So if commemorating the Holocaust in the public sphere requires Jews to play down their affiliation with Israel, and to elide the intimate connection between what the Holocaust represents and the significance of a Jewish state in our own time, then I’d say we are better off without Holocaust Remembrance Day.
That doesn’t mean Jews should forget about the Nazi extermination. Nor will they, as the enduring power of Yom HaShoah in Israel attests. But surely it’s better to just commemorate it among ourselves, and stress to the outside world that self-determination is our antidote to centuries of anti-Semitism, than to be forced into ugly compromises about when we can or can’t mention Israel.
Ben Cohen is the Shillman Analyst for jns.org, where this essay originally appeared.